Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Fact-checking Immigration Claims

. Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Yglesias passes along this FactCheck.org report on the effect of immigration on wages and jobs in the United States.

Study after study has shown that immigrants grow the economy, expanding demand for goods and services that the foreign-born workers and their families consume, and thereby creating jobs. There is even broad agreement among economists that while immigrants may push down wages for some, the overall effect is to increase average wages for American-born workers. ...

[Congressman Gary] Miller makes it all sound so easy: Eight million illegal immigrants working in the U.S., 15 million unemployed American citizens and legal immigrants — we could cut the number of unemployed in half if we just booted out the illegal workers. "The numbers are simple," he says.

The numbers certainly would be simple, if they worked that way. But they don’t.


The whole thing is worth reading, and there is a list of citations for those who wish to dig deeper.

1 comments:

Emmanuel said...

While I generally support studies which indicate gains from migration, I am wary of stuff coming from the EPI. They may trip up the rather impressionable Michael Pettis, but others should take their "research" with a grain of salt.

To be fair, the extensive work of George Borjas arguing the opposite deserves further mention.

Fact-checking Immigration Claims
 

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